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Rodanthi Tzanelli (2003) ‘The Politics of Cultural Reciprocity: Greek Counter-
Hegemony in Athens 2004’, Published by the School of Social Policy,
Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NF,
UK at http://www.kent.ac.uk/sspssr/research/papers/polcult.pdf
The Politics of Cultural Reciprocity: Greek Counter-
Hegemony in Athens 2004 1
‘The concern with Classical roots and European identity, the anxiety that Greeks sometimes
ruefully acknowledge as proghonopliksia [obsession with ancestors], is the symptom of a
deeply wounding sense of social, cultural, economic, and political dependency. If one
commentator on a recent dispute [...] rather plaintively wondered why foreign commentators
seem disenchanted with romantic philhellenism, for example, I suspect that such hurt and
puzzlement arise from the perception of precisely that dependency. Apparently the same
Western intellectual establishment has duplicitously moved the goalposts and changed the
rules of play. Romanticism has given way to deconstruction, and those whom romanticism
had once “constructed” as true Hellenes now feel, in every sense, undone’.
M.Herzfeld
Walter Benjamin likened progress to the angelic dilemma of movement. The
angel of progress, claimed Benjamin, cannot decide whether he should look
1 A version of this paper was published as ‘Giving Gifts (And Then Taking Them Back): Identity, Reciprocity and
Symbolic Power in the Context of Athens 2004’, The Journal for Cultural Research, 8(4).

ack, to the past, gather the pieces of debris that fly around him and ‘make
whole what has been smashed’ (1992: 249), or follow the Edenic storm that
propels him toward the future. This metaphor beautifully captures modern
Greek associations of ‘progress’ with Hellenic history. This paper aims to
explore such associations through the rhetoric that various Greek actors
employed to discuss the Olympiad of 2004. This rhetoric, I argue, is
genealogically linked to the hegemonisation of modern Greek culture by
Western narratives that identified Hellenic civilisation with modernity, and
denigrated modern Greeks for failing to live up to their illustrious ancestry.
The Greek state did not simply comply with such narratives, on the contrary,
it used them to contest the power relationship that the narrative itself
perpetuates. In the context of Athens 2004 official Greek counter-hegemonic
discourse negotiates the nature of the Greek-West relationship and
reconstructs its rationale. According to the official Greek line of
argumentation, the Olympic Games are a value that ought to circulate in a
closed-circuit system of reciprocity between Greece and an imaginary ‘West’ –
a West that is metonymically linked to a fictional ‘Europe’, or even to
humanity as a whole. This argument guarantees the recognition of modern
Greece as a benefactor of humanity, and as a country that is culturally and
politically equal to those powerful ones that constantly criticise it for its
‘backwardness’. It is this narrative that equates (Bourdieu, 1984; Stewart,
1991)) political and economic with cultural capital.
The paper has been divided into two parts. In Part I, I discuss the
implications of Greece’s cultural and economic hegemonisation by the West –

that is, the impact of Western ideas in the process of Greek nation building.
The debate is related to the genealogy and institution of the Olympic Games
as a transnational value and their re-emergence in the context of Athens
2004. Part II examines closely the response that Greek state agents proffer to
past and contemporary Western accusations of backwardness and inefficiency
by prioritising Hellenic cultural over Western economic capital. I deconstruct
the symbolic value that Greeks attribute to the Olympics by looking at the
cultural logic underpinning their attempt to equate different types of capital.
The unequal relationship between Greece and the West is contested through
the presentation of modern Greeks as heirs of the ancient Hellenes, the
alleged cultural benefactors of humanity to whom Western civilisation ‘owes’
its existence.
I: HEGEMONY AND IDENTITY
Contextualised Orientalisms: The Case of Greece
The trajectory of those hegemonic discourses that represent modern Greece
as a European ‘pariah’ is suggestive and pertinent, as they comprise a
significant, though neglected, variant of what Edward Said (1978) famously
termed ‘Orientalism’. According to Said, during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries a de-hypostasised, homogenous ‘Orient’ emerged in Western textual
networks. The characteristics of this ‘Orient’ acquired meaning as the binary
opposites of a series of essentialised Western qualities. So, if the West was
rational, civilised and governed by ‘order’, the ‘Orient’ was irrational,
uncivilised and characterised by disorder. Such binarisms were inherent in

colonial practices: Western powers subjected and governed colonies
economically, and Western writers (often involved in colonial governance)
subjected the category of ‘Orient’ to scrutiny. We nowadays know a lot about
the ways in which the ‘Orient’ came into being in Western colonial
imaginations. Few know, however, that modern Greece emerged from the
same colonial predicates. The memory of its birth throes is retained by
modern Greeks in their treatment of all things ‘Hellenic’, including the
Olympics.
‘Modern’ Greece did not exist in the geopolitical map of Europe before
the 1830s, when a small part of the Greek peninsula was liberated from the
Ottoman Empire. Despite the preceding bloody Greek revolution (1821-1828),
the liberation was made possible with the help of the ‘Great European Powers’
(Britain, France and Russia). Western support was the by-product of
‘philhellenism’, a assortment of romantic ideas that advocated nationalist
feelings and Greek political liberation, but simultaneously demanded the
revival of a Hellenic civilisation that existed only in the imagination of Western
classicist scholars. The perfection of this imaginary Hellenism has been
discussed as the site of colonial oppression (Bernal 1991): the supposed
superiority of ancient Athens in relation to all other ancient civilisations,
became analogous to the superiority of nineteenth-century colonial powers
vis-à-vis the exotic colonised. The rationale of this argument was grounded
on the belief that Europeans were the spiritual children of Hellas, and that
ancient Greek civilisation was the cradle of Europe. Not only had the
European imagination ‘colonised’ Greek culture, but also it ultimately provided

Greek self-narration with a ‘kernel’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1995), a reference
point. The way that modern Greeks internalised Western discourse is still
preserved in their persistence in calling themselves Neohellenes or modern
Hellenes, unconsciously designating their ‘crypto-colonial’ identity (Herzfeld,
2002b). Unfortunately, the other, actual colonial past, the subjection of the
Greek peninsula to the Ottomans for centuries, induced scorn and contempt
for the modern Greeks. The verdict was that Ottoman rule had ‘orientalised’
them to such an extent, that they had lost their centrality in European identity
(Herzfeld, 1987). This discourse, replete with derogative terms such as ‘filthy’,
‘disorderly’, ‘barbarous’, or simply, ‘Oriental/Turkish’, all of them popular in
the nineteenth-century Western literature on Greece, makes philhellenism (as
the love for things Hellenic, but not Neohellenic) a strange version of
Orientalism (the interest in things Oriental, coupled with a contempt for the
actual, living, ‘Orients’ of the colonial nations). The schizophrenic Western
discourse, in which Greece simultaneously played the role of the birthplace of
Europe and its internal ‘other’, was expressed by Greeks also in their attempts
to repress or resist their Ottoman past in every possible way.
Post-liberation Western political involvement in Greece complemented
the symbolic colonisation of Greek culture. We find such crypto-colonialisms in
different periods; the actors and agents involved are also different, but the
consequences were always catastrophic. In the 1850s Western involvement in
Greece involved a temporary occupation of the Greek capital by the British
fleet. In 1919 it contributed to the outbreak of a Greek-Turkish war that was
initially supported (‘instigated’, according to some Greek historians) by Britain

and France, and led to the uprooting of Greek communities in Asia Minor.
During World War II, British confrontation with communists within Greece
overdetermined a civil war (1944-1949) that still divides Greeks. In the Cold
War era Greece was caught between the Western and Soviet spheres of
influence. A dictatorship (1967-1974) fully revived the narrative of Hellas-as-
Europe, bestowing it also with Christian Orthodox, right-wing undertones
(Herzfeld, 2002a: 13-15). Gradually, the discourse of Hellenic excellence was
involved in Greek foreign and domestic policy and fostered an ‘underdog
culture’ (Diamantouros, 1983) - an inward-looking, Christian-‘Hellenocentric’
culture, that defensively warns against foreign interventions, alien elements
and cultural difference. Apparently, the ‘curse of philhellenism’, to borrow
Stathis Gourgouris’ apt metaphor (1996), continues to cast its shadow over
modern Greece -constantly changing forms, but not objectives.
This country, considered politically and economically ‘impoverished’ in
the West, hosted the Olympiad of 2004. The sheer size of competing cities for
2004 was imposing, and Greece was not everybody’s favourite candidate. One
may wonder why this commotion over such an event. Even the purely
academic interest in the Olympiad is massive and worldwide, with many
centres and Universities investigating the phenomenon, its roots and its
development (Toohey and Veal, 2000: 1-2). It is commonly known that the
Games began over 3000 years ago in the Greek peninsula as a religious ritual
that celebrated physical excellence and rigor. But their revival in 1896,
examined below, is a question of a different order. Throughout this paper I
claim that we must examine closely the importance of the Olympics for the

international community, not to celebrate them, but to uncover the political
and moral implications of their ritualistic repetition. The Olympiad should be
regarded as a survival of this nineteenth-century narrative that made Hellenic
civilisation the core of European modernity. ‘Olympism’ is, in other words, the
collective celebration of a metanarrative on European ancestral origins. The
circulation of the Games in the community of nations impregnates them with
meaning and transforms them into a relational value. It is precisely this
relational dimension that Greek state representatives mobilised in their
Olympic rhetoric.
Identity in Antiquity/Antiquity as Modernity
From the outset the Olympics and so-called ‘Olympism’, the philosophy of the
event, were permeated by nationalist ideology. Although the origin of the
modern Games is usually attributed to a Frenchman, Pierre Fredy, Baron de
Coubertin (1863-1937), a similar proto-movement existed in Greece long
before de Coubertin’s initiative.
It began with a suggestion by a
Constantinopolitan Greek poet, Panagiotis Soutsos (1806-1868), to Ioannis
Kolettis, the Greek Minister of the Interior (Young, 1996: 17-18). The
suggestion was focused around the establishment of a national day on which
Greeks would celebrate the War of Independence (24 March), the ritualistic
reverence of the Greek ‘spirit’ par excellence that has not lost its importance
ever since. Although the national day was immediately established, it took the
state over a decade to revive the Olympiad. In 1859, Zappas, a Greek
merchant undertook the organisation of the first commercially based Olympic

event. In his proto-Olympic movement we note the co-existent promotion of
Greek products and individuals with a revival of what were considered as
ancient Olympic rituals. The event was institutionalised and a number of
similar festivals took place over the next three decades (1870, 1875, 1888
and 1889).
I have already noted that the relationship between nationalism and the
Olympics existed long before their universal appeal. The involvement of a
man of letters in the Olympic revival is not coincidental, if we consider
Soutsos’ literary work in its historical and linguistic context. The institution of
modern Greece did not necessarily solve the problem of a polyglot and polyidiomatic
would-be nation that had spent centuries under the Ottoman ‘yoke’.
It was not just that Greek citizens were bilingual and trilingual, but also that
not all those populations who considered themselves Greek were recognised
as such by the Greek state or lived within it. The Babelic outcome of Greek
liberation was further worsened by philhellenic dissatisfaction and fear that
the Great Powers of Europe had given birth rights to a degenerate non-
European ‘race’. To the straightforward Orientalist discourse of ‘Ottoman
Greekness’, we can add another that denied modern Greeks any association
with their Hellenic forefathers, even one based upon cultural ‘degeneration’.
This was expressed by Jacob Philipp Falmerayer, a Tyrolean historian who
assumed the status of Satan in Greek culture when in the 1830s he claimed
that the modern Greeks comprised a bastard Slav nation that had nothing to
do with ancient Hellas (Skopetea, 1999). In an age in which culture was
confused with ‘race’ and ‘blood’, this accusation by a Hellenist scholar was

unbearable. In fact, the Falmerayer trauma was never overcome, and even
today Greek academics assume the same old defensive attitude towards the
Tyrolian classicist. In Soutsos’ period, the question of the unity and historical
continuity of the Greek nation was manifested mainly in the domain of
language. Greek academics and literati were split into three groups, each
defending a different version of Greek (and therefore ‘Greekness’): the
demoticists supported the ‘live’ language of the folk, adumbrating a fullyfledged
romantic movement; the Hellenists advocated the ancient Greek
version, identifying modern with ancient Greek identity; and the
katharevousianoi (the ‘purified’), claimed that a mixture of the two should
represent modern Greekness. It is interesting that Soutsos began as a
demoticist, but eventually became an advocate of katharevousa, an artificial
Greek language that would dominate the Greek bureaucratic regime till 1974.
The merging of nationalist demoticism and ketharevousa statism determined
the content of Greek national ideology and gave shape to the modern Greek
nation-state. Soutsos’ interest in the Olympics should not be separated from
his conviction that by resurrecting things ancient Greek he would recover this
long-lost Hellenic modernity for his homeland.
Soutsos’ Olympic ideal was shared by later generations of literati. Most
prominent was Angelos Sikelianos, a demoticist, who sought to revive a
version of the Olympics in Delphi in 1927. Interestingly, Sikelianos’ project
had as an end the ‘alleviation of humanity from pain’ (Vitti, 1989: 339).
Context binds Soutsos and Sikelianos: the first half of the nineteenth century
is the period in which the Greeks discover their ‘Great Idea’, a nationalistic

project that aimed at the recovery of pre-Ottoman ‘Byzantine Hellenism’ (by
means of expansion towards the boundaries of the Ottoman empire) and the
revival of a Hellenic spirit that was so loved by other European nations.
Contrariwise, the second half of the 1920s marks the end of the ‘Great Idea’
era with the Greek-Turkish Asia Minor War (see first section). Greece’s defeat
in Turkey wounded national honour and was followed by diplomatic isolation
and introversion. Sikelianos’ metaphysical anxieties and Olympian plans
invited further detachment from reality, through the celebration of a suprahistorical
‘Hellenic spirit’.
I have examined the Greek genealogy of the modern Olympics at
length, because it sheds light on their role in the construction of Neohellenic
identity. Henceforth I will maintain that every time Greeks invoke the Olympic
discourse they resurrect their ‘ancient modernity’ – a peculiar modernity that
came to mirror their cultural identity. The Greek metaphor of the nation ‘risen
from the phoenix’s ashes’ applies here: Hellenism is not simply resurrected
every time the Olympics take place, it is also revered as a universal
Neohellenic heritage. The language of resurrection is the vocabulary of
nationalist primordialism, after all: resurrection ends the ‘ever-existing’
nation’s dormant condition and marks its return to the sphere of politics
(Gellner, 1998). We can place this analysis of Greek Olympic nationalism in
the wider framework of Europe and beyond: even de Coubertin’s inspiration
to revive the Games and establish an International Olympic Committee (IOC)
stemmed from his determination to hearten his French compatriots after their
devastating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870). His selection of venue

for the first Games, Greece, is also decisive: the discourse of Hellenic
excellence was still alive in 1896, when the Games took place in Athens,
despite the country’s economic collapse and political upheavals (Guttmann,
1988: 437; Gallant, 2002: 51). The involvement of nationalism and politics in
the Olympics is as enduring as the institution itself. We can note a few
notorious cases: American complaints about biased British Judges in the
Olympic elections of 1908; the resignation of an IOC British member when,
after the outbreak of the Great War, the German members of the Committee
were not ousted (Leiper, 1988: 332); the refusal of Canada to allow
Taiwanese athletes enter the country for the 1976 Olympics as competitors of
the ‘Republic of China’ (Berlioux, 1976).
The classicist-Orientalist discourse of Hellenic superiority influenced the
Olympic Charter, de Coubertin’s foundational document of the Games. The
document describes Olympism as ‘a philosophy of life’ that advocates the
merging of culture, sports and education. More significantly, Olympism ‘seeks
to create [...] respect for universal fundamental ethical principles’ (IOC, 1995
in Toohey and Veal, 1999: 51). The appeal to a universal norm of ethics is, in
effect, the universalisation of certain norms that derive from an imaginary
Hellenic civilisation - the ‘establishment of a peaceful society concerned with
the preservation of human dignity’, to quote the Olympic Chart again. This
may sound mere rhetoric, but it has an impact on political reality. The very
words of the Charter are manipulated in contemporary Greek political
discourse for internal and external consumption. The latter will become the

focus of analysis, because it will illuminate the rationale of official Greek
resistance to Western hegemony.
Imagining Modernity
I begin by highlighting the political implications of contemporary Western
contempt for modern Greece. It has not been long since the assassination of
the British diplomat Steve Saunders by the terrorist organisation ‘17 th
November’ in Greece. On the eve of the production of an American report on
terrorism, the Saunders case became a notorious example of loss of state
control and disorder. It is significant that the American report and the British
press converged upon one thing: that Greece displayed the signs of disorder
and Oriental corruption. Greek policy on terrorism was likened to the
Pakistani, and the Greek government was condemned for its incompetence.
The exclusion of Greece from the geopolitical map of ‘Europe’ was a
slur on Greek ‘national honour’ – a kinship term grounded in the specifics of
Greek culture. It was not surprising that one of the key aims of ATHOC
(Organising Committee for Athens 2004) became the preservation of security.
The official website of Athens 2004 has an extensive report on how security
will be tackled in co-operation with a special Greek Police Unit and a Special
Forces Unit. This statement is also linked to the principles of Olympism,
especially its peace-related aims, which I examine at length in the second
part of the paper. A reference is made to 37 security agreements that Greece
signed with other countries, and the establishment of an Olympic Advisory
Group (OAG) ‘with the participation of many countries with experience on

security-related issues: the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, France, Spain,
and Israel’ (Athens 2004). The presence of America and Britain in the OAG is
a translucent mark of Greece’s attachment to certain Western policies; the
presence of another two American (at the time) satellites (Spain, Israel) only
certifies that. On an official level, ATHOC affixed itself to the American ‘antiterrorist’
movement, as ATHOC President Gianna Angelopoulou-Daskalaki
stated in various interviews. Angelopoulou-Daskalaki, together with IOC
security consultant Peter Ryan also debated the fear that 9/11 inspired about
possible terrorist attacks in the Athens Olympiad (Canada Sports, 13
September, 2002).
The fears are very real if one considers the shocking killing of 11 Israeli
athletes and coaches by terrorists at the Munich Olympics of 1972. However,
the framework in which the argument was placed is identical to the antiterrorist
manifestos of the G.W. Bush administration – a repetition that
reinforces Greek internalisation of American, this time, hegemony. Following
the bombing attacks in Spain (March 2004), which were attributed to terrorist
forces, Greece officially asked NATO for help with Olympic security. The
possibility of an Al Qaeda attack on the Olympics is aggravated by homegrown
concerns that the November 17 th
group will make a dramatic reappearance
(CBS, 12 March 2004). Such was the fear that Greece would be
ridiculed in the eyes of the powerful, that on 24 June 2004 legislation was
introduced in parliament that ‘banned the use of arms by non-Greek guards
for athletes and VIPs within Olympic venues and sites’ (Channelnewasia, 26
June 2004). NATO accepted the Greek invitation and promised the provision

of technology for airspace and maritime surveillance as well as the
deployment of its chemical, biological, radiological and Nuclear Defence
Battalion (NATO-OTAN, 23-25 June 2004). The whole venture was
condemned by the Greek Communist Party (KKE) that saw in such security
arrangements an excuse ‘to justify pre-emptive wars, such as those against
Afganistan and Iraq, and to restrict civil rights and liberties’ (Consulate
General, LA, CA, 26 June 2004).
Even in this case, the whole debate moves from the context of
terrorism to that of Hellenic Orientalism. For example, ATHOC expressed
gratitude for the favourable comments on Greece’s progress on the Olympics
by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s endorsement was
considered an honour and was included in the official ATHOC website. This
‘positive report’ concluded with the mayor’s compliments to ‘Athenian’ and
‘Greek’ (viz. ‘Hellenic) character:
Athens is the birthplace of western civilisation – the city where democracy was
born – and we’re sure we won’t forget that when we’re watching the Olympic
Games (Athens 2004).
Such weighty expectations alarmed the ATHOC agents. Angelopoulou-
Daskalaki revealed the innermost Greek concerns in a media briefing in 2002.
‘The Greek people have been planning for this homecoming for more that 100
years’, she argued (Greek Embassy, Washington DC, 14 September 2002).
The ‘homecoming’ rhetoric presents Athens 2004 as a burden that Greece has
to carry under the gaze of powerful Judges, such as America. The burden is
generated by Greece’s ‘imaginary modernity’ (Chambers, 1990: 17): a
peculiar modernity that advocates American and other Western ‘progressive’

discourses of security, but remains imaginary in so far as it looks backwards
to a Hellenic past, the essence of Greek nationalism.
ATHOC’s need to sustain ‘imaginary modernity’ was intensified by the
feeling that an ever-present authority, a reified West, is inspecting Greece’s
performance (see BBC Sports). It is true that the Greeks had to fight hard to
secure the Games. The legacy of the disastrous Greek campaign of 1990 for
the Centennial Olympics was seen at home and abroad as a result of
ineptitude and commercial backwardness. The 1997 election was equally
difficult, and when Greece appeared to be the winner, Greek media
transformed the news into a national celebration. Nevertheless, ATHOC’s
frequent references to IOC’s scrutiny of the preparations stood as an
accusation of Greek ineptitude. The ATHOC website advertised the progress
made on security and infrastructural preparations. Press releases reported on
the ‘need for speed’ (OIOC, 8 November, 2002), and quoted Dr. Jacques
Rogge, Chairman of the Coordination Commission, who insisted that ‘time is
critical’ and Greece must keep ‘on track’ (OIOC, 25 August, 2000; 16
February, 2001). The scepticism about Greek competence is nicely captured
in the words of Denis Oswald, Rogge’s successor in 2001:
IOC’s priority is to ensure the Athens organisers and Greek government provide the
venues and services required to allow the athletes to compete at the level they
expect. This is the bare minimum, but we should expect more from these Games
on their return to their birthplace. [...] Each and every delay has the potential to
diminish the legacy these Games could provide for Greece and Olympic tradition
(OIOC, 28 September, 2001).

The criticism is subtle. We have to consider the quote alongside accusations
of Greek inefficiency that are more directly linked to discourses about the
preservation of Hellenic heritage in order to realise the extent of the damage.
ATHOC’s plan to construct a 50,000-seat canoeing and rowing centre at the
location of the famous battle of Marathon was met with brutal criticism,
especially in Britain. John Carr, reporting from Athens, reminded us of the
significance of the Hellenic battle of Marathon against the Persians as ‘a
monument of the European heritage’ (News and Opinions). The debate is
concerned with Greece’s ability to safeguard its Hellenic heritage and is
informed by the selfsame Western hegemony already examined. The issue
was re-baptised into ‘Athenian Olympic vandalism’ when reporters, academics
and other literati joined Carr and turned the debate into a referendum on the
return of the ‘Elgin Marbles’ to Greece (see News and Opinions and The
Times, 22 February 2001). The conflation of the Olympic with the Elgin
debate exposes a labyrinthine colonial discourse that still pursues the
‘Neohellenes’. Both the argument that the marbles belong to the history of
Bloomsbury Museum and that the Greeks would not know how to conserve
them anyway (see the website of The British Committee for the Restitution of
the Parthenon Marbles), prove how contemptuous Britain is of Greece. There
is insufficient space to discuss this question at length. I will only mention that
ATHOC’s anxiety to excel for the sake of any imaginary or real ‘West’ stopped
here. From that point on the Olympics were seen by ATHOC as an
opportunity for the British Government to prove how ‘generous’, ‘just’,
‘internationalist’ and ‘progressive it really is’ (Parthenon 2004). British

generosity was invoked for a sole purpose, the return of the Elgin Marbles to
Athens, where they belong just in time for the Olympics. Thus, ATHOC
presented the return as an act of giving a gift, even though the gift itself
allegedly ‘belongs’ to the recipient. The truth is that the Greek state feels
gratitude to no ‘usurper’ of its ‘heritage’ and that it is using the trope of
generosity for a different purpose. ‘Generosity’ was central to ATHOC’s
Olympic discourse and shed light on Greece’s essentially anti-Western
counter-hegemonic movement. Official Greek counter-hegemony was
constructed upon the idea of an unpaid debt - only this time Greece was not
the one who had to answer for its shortcomings.
II: RECIPROCITY AS SYMBOLIC POWER
The Norm of Gift-giving
We can use as a starting point the case that official Greek commentators
made for Athens 2004. They based it on two arguments: (1) the Olympics are
part of Athenian Greek heritage, and (2) Greece had to wait for over a
hundred years to host them. Both arguments (which appeared repeatedly on
ATHOC’s website and in political or media commentary) are references to the
moral economy of giving. They were addressed to external audiences, both
imaginary (the ‘West’, ‘Europe’) and real (IOC members), and functioned as
reminders of an unfinished reciprocal cycle. We can translate the Greek
argument as follows: (1) the Hellenic forefathers gave the ‘West’ and ‘Europe’
civilisation; (2) their descendants demand the long-delayed reciprocation for

this kindness. The first part of the argument repeats the Hellenic-Orientalist
discourse, whereas the second part interprets and contests it.
My take on the moral economy of giving does not mean that I
disregard the importance of Olympic commercialism for the city of Athens and
the Greek state. Once the bid was successful, the Internet bristled with Greek
invitations to businesses, tourist and other transnational organisations to
invest in Greece (see The Business and Investment World of Greece). But I
maintain that the moral discourse outlined above is present also in such
networks (significantly, one of the official 2004 sponsors, Alpha Bank,
currently follows the same strategy of promotion on its own website; see
Alpha Bank). This invites us to examine the close-knit relationship between
the economic significance of the Olympiad and the norm of reciprocity (the
duty to reciprocate) that Greek state agents invoke. Perhaps moral and
market economies are regulated by different laws: the marketisation of
Hellenic Greekness in the context of 2004 could easily be regarded as the
functionalisation (de-symbolisation, to follow Berking (1996: 127)) of the
West-East system of reciprocity that Greek agents try to promote in their
Olympic case (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979). Marcel Mauss’ seminal study of
the gift (1954) already presents the de-symbolisation of gift-giving as the
symptom of modernity (Ardener, 1989). However, we must recall that
‘relations within markets and capitalist organisations also have a moralcultural
dimension’ (Sayer, 1999:65). In the context of Athens 2004 the moral
dimension of exchange is grounded on the unanimously accepted value of
Hellenic culture. Greek agents mobilised the ‘situational value’ (Appadurai,

1986: 5) of Hellenic culture by making available to the ‘civilised world’
products that have an emotional appeal. This appeal can be explained by
reference to the idea that Olympiad-related products retain the ‘spirit’ of the
alleged cultural donor of humanity (see also Sahlins, 1974: 169), Greece. A
very good example of this is the Athens 2004 Olympic mascot. During the
competition, ATHOC set a series of standards and prerequisites the mascot
had to fulfil. We note that alongside mundane, economic, criteria (such as
‘electronic replication potential’ of the proposed image), the mascot ought to:
Be the Athens 2004 ambassador to the world
Reflect the Athens 2004 vision and values
Reflect the values of Olympism
Be unique
Promote the Image of Athens and Greece (Athens 2004)
Indeed, the chosen mascots were two dolls (Athena and Phevos) that
embodied all these ideals. ‘Their creation was inspired by an ancient Greek
doll’, the official 2004 website informs us. ‘Their names are linked to ancient
Greece. And yet the two siblings are children of modern times. [...] Phevos is
the name of the Olympian god of light and music, known as Apollo. Athena
[is] goddess of wisdom and patron of the city of Athens’. In this way, Phevos
and Athena represent the link between Greek history and the modern Olympic
Games. The website provides an extensive history of these dolls and
illustrations of the original religious idols by which they were inspired (Athens
2004). The Hellenic heritage is thus re-appropriated by modern Greeks, who
assert their modernity through a shadowy antiquity. For the Greeks what is
marketised has an uncontested universal appeal and symbolic meaning.

Significantly, the Greek logic does not transcend the structurally
determining symbolisation that characterises the capitalist system (Sahlins,
1976: 210) but counter-poses to this system a pre-capitalist logic of
exchange. In other words, the dolls hold together a Greek counter-hegemonic
narrative with obvious moralistic undertones, simply translating it into
economics. The exchange-value of the 2004 mascot becomes a reminder of
the Hellenic ‘gift’ of civilisation to Europe, a non-rationalised form of giving.
Phevos and Athena perform the function of a ‘judge’, which demands from
the ‘civilised world’ the recognition of Greece as a benefactor of humanity.
Greek persistence in interchanging Western economic and Greek cultural
capital could be regarded as a indication of what anthropologist Michael
Herzfeld termed poniria (Herzfeld, 1985:25; 1991:52): a crafty, ‘low-cunning’
attitude the Greeks display in their interaction with ‘outsiders’/foreigners
which historically originates both in their market-oriented relationship with the
West and their resistance to their Ottoman colonisers.
Herzfeld’s astute analysis explains a certain aspect of the Greek
Olympic discourse because it points to its origins. In the context of the late
capitalist economy, the Hellenic ideal acquires for Greeks the status of a
‘scarce resource’ (Appadurai, 1981) whose exchange-value is maximised
through a discourse on reciprocity. This, however, is precisely what takes us
beyond Herzfeld’s analysis of poniria as counter-hegemony, and into the
domain of reciprocity-as-recognition. Despite their protests, Greek state
agents worked hard to present the world with an excellent event. The aim of
the managing director of ATHOC, Kostas Bakouris, was to ‘demonstrate fiscal

esponsibility’ and to work against ‘the rather dubious reputation of Greece’.
‘We Greeks see [Athens 2004] as a national project’, he explained in
interviews (Greece: Government, Telecommunications, Tourism). It would be
easy to follow the post-modern argument here, and read this statement as
Greece’s attention to superficial duties – to assume, in other words, that ‘the
struggle for recognition takes place entirely at the level of appearances, in
which there is no distance between recognition for looking good and for being
good’ (O’Neill, 1999: 80). Yet, the coupling of moral imperatives with ‘fiscal
responsibility’ is a quite interesting move by Bakouris, and demonstrates that
what we have to examine are not the rules of the market economy that the
Greeks must follow, but the ethical presuppositions on which Greek actors
operated. We also have to examine the argument in its reverse form – that is,
by placing the Greeks in the position of the recipient. If the Olympics are a
‘gift’ that periodically circulates in the community of nations, their ‘donation’
to Greece is a form of recognition by an international community. The idea of
‘giving’ generates a number of non-contractual responsibilities (on which
contractual relationships are based, after all) on the part of the recipient.
Olympics-as-gift institutionalise the relationship of Greece with the rest of the
world, while at the same time they formalise norms of reciprocity. This means
that Greek state agents are currently tied to a number of obligations in the
eyes of their ‘donors’. It is interesting that the acknowledgment of their debt
is coupled by assertions in which even their duty as gift-recipients is
contested.

The route to Eden: Giving, Sacrifice, Power
Alvin Gouldner pointed out that the norm of reciprocity is present in
relationships of unanimously accepted equality insofar as reciprocation
involves recognition (Gouldner, 1960; 1973). Contrariwise, he argued, in any
kind of power-relationship only one side is burdened by duty whereas the
other enjoys rights. This kind of relationship, which Gouldner called
complementarity, does not involve recognition of the weak party by the
powerful – and the opposite would be ridiculous, since in relationships of
power the weak party’s recognition of the strong cannot be reciprocated.
Gouldner’s analysis calls upon the Hegelian dilemma of the master-slave
relationship in which recognition becomes impossible (but see also Yar, 2001:
292). I will claim that in the Olympic context the relationship of Greece with
an imaginary ‘West’ is much more complex than the Hegelian one. This
happens because Greece’s election as the Olympic host by the IOC is a
unique occasion of recognition that fails to place Greece in the position of the
grateful recipient. The situational role of Greece in this Olympic system of
‘gift’-circulation is very peculiar, if we take into account that Athens is the only
city in which the role of the host and the guest merge. Since, unanimously,
the birthplace of the Olympiad is Athens, Greece can freely claim that it is
currently hosting its own culture. This is acknowledged by the Greek Embassy
in Warsaw thus:
Greece realised that these Games will become the “mirror” of itself abroad and for
the next seven years Athens will become the centre of earth since the whole world
is watching (Greek Embassy, Poland).

The tautological nature of the Orientalist-Hellenic discourse is exposed in a
neat way - the Hellenic Games become a ‘mirror’ of Greek culture. This
internalisation of the Hellenic project, which fostered Greek identity since the
institution of modern Greece, bears the mark of an ecumenical nationalism: a
nationalism that promotes the exclusivity of the ‘nation’, but is predicated
upon universalised ideas (‘Hellas is the birthplace of civilisation’). The official
Greek recourse to this appeal during the 1990 and 1997 IOC host elections is
revealing, because it functioned as chastisement of those who cast doubt
upon the Greek ability to deliver in 2004. Who could be a better host than the
guest, so to speak?
The absurdity of the debate does not divest it of its power. If giving
belongs to the domain of the moral economy, we should examine it both as
an economic and a moral phenomenon. My coupling of moral and economic
norms does not support their confusion, but their dialogical relationship.
Because of that, alongside my take on reciprocity as recognition, I follow
Stephen Gudeman’s (1986: 37-43) analysis of economy as culture. For the
purpose of my analysis I will consider ‘culture’ as the domain of
representation that cannot be separated from the moral-cosmological order it
conveys. As Gudeman argues, economic models are extensions or replicas of
specific cosmological orders. We cannot simply assume that economies are
divorced from cultural contexts, because they borrow from all domains of
social and cultural life to construct their web of rules and regulations. The
capitalist idea of providential economy, the Weberian contribution to sociology
(Weber, 1985), is a particularly interesting example of economics-as-culture

that Marshall Sahlins (1996) diligently analysed. I will begin by observing that
likewise, the official Greek rationale of Athens 2004 draws upon the Christian
cosmological order that promotes the idea of giving as a regulative
mechanism in relationships.
My hypothesis opens a dialogue with that of the most perceptive
analyst of Greek culture, Michael Herzfeld. According to Herzfeld, Greek
cosmology was articulated partially as a response to the Western narrative of
modern Greece’s cultural decline. Greeks viewed themselves (as Westerners
viewed them) as a fallen culture, an idea that was symbolised with the help of
the religious myth of the Edenic fall (Herzfeld, 1987: 37). More specifically,
the conquest of the Byzantine Empire by the ‘infidel Turks’ was retroactively
explained by Greeks on the basis of the sinful Byzantine iconoclastic rivalry, a
disagreement on whether Christians should worship religious icons or the idea
of God that was reflected in them. This line of argument appears (albeit
rather underdeveloped) in the work of some Greek historians. For Chassiotis
for example, even Greeks under the Ottoman ‘yoke’ began to believe that the
fall of Byzantium was God’s punishment (Chassiotis, 1981: 63-65). It is
somehow strange, however, that even then Greeks managed to foster a selfimage
as God’s elect who may have been tried, but would eventually be
absolved.
One might argue that the legend of ‘the chosen’ played a consoling
role during the period of Ottoman rule, becoming something like the morality
of the Nietzschean slaves (Nietzsche, 1996: 4-5, 111): by dreaming of an
imminent post-colonial destiny as the ‘chosen’, proto-Greek communities lived

in a protective self-denial of their subjection. But the redeeming element of
this narrative compels me to move away from the dooming aspects of the
Edenic rationale. I believe that in the crypto-colonial context of the postliberation
period, the legend of the ‘chosen’ helped Greeks to claim symbolic
superiority vis-à-vis their Western patrons. The game that the Greeks played
is commonly known as hermeneutics, an actual case of re-interpretation of a
historical narrative. The narrative of the ‘chosen people’ presented a surplus
of meanings, ‘allowing the production of new statements’ (Kearney, 1984: 38)
that kept a distinctively Greek culture alive. In the post-liberation version of
the ‘chosen’ the Byzantine Greeks became a ‘nation’ (note how the idea of the
‘nation’ was projected back to the pre-Ottoman past) that had suffered in the
hands of the Turks because the ‘West’ (an imaginary entity and a category
which did not exist at the dawn of the modern ages) did not assist Greek
Byzantium in its defence against them. Significantly, in this case Byzantium
was seen by Greeks as a benefactor of the civilised world, because it held
back the Turkish ‘tide’ for just long enough to reduce Ottoman power and
increase Western defence. When the Byzantine Empire fell, all its scholars fled
to the West, bringing the ‘lights of civilisation’ to its ‘unrefined’ populations,
and reviving Hellenic ‘Greekness’ in the form of a Renaissance. Again, the
narrative pays disproportionate attention to the importance of Greek cultural
capital, implicitly juxtaposing it to Western economic and political capital. The
narrative is still being perpetrated in the work of certain Greek academic
scholars. We read for example in the seminal study of Byzantium by the
byzantinist John Karayannopoulos that:

The safeguarding role of Byzantium was invaluable. Even those who contested the
Byzantine contribution to the shaping of Western European civilisation in the past,
agreed on one thing: that the empire worked as a fortress (of civilisation). […]
Because, as an English historian [Steven Runciman] correctly argued, if Islam had
used the Balkans as a military base, it could have invaded Central Europe earlier
than the Turks. Moreover, without Byzantium, the Arabs of Africa could have
reached and devastated the coastal part of Italy (1993: 469).
The endorsement of the thesis by another great western byzantinist,
Runciman, adds to the reliability of Karayannopoulos’ argument. Note that in
all these cases Greece has a destiny to fulfil – a clear connection between the
romantic notion of the Volksgeist’s mission of self-fulfilment (Liakos, 2002:
31-32) and Aristotelian teleology. Neohellenic thought bears the stamp of
Aristotelianism, because the idea of a Greek civilising mission alludes to a
teleology that underscores Aristotle’s metaphysics. Like all ‘things,’ the Greek
nation carried within it a telos, a purpose and an end, which was its very
essence (the Aristotelian ousia) that justified its existence (Aristotle, I, 1924:
Book B, ch. VIII, 198b-199b). We must bear in mind that Greek culture was
strongly influenced by the German romanticism of Herder. Herder’s belief that
every nation had its own, unique Geist (spirit) and its special mission (De
Zengodita, 1989: 86-89) assumed ecumenical proportions for Greeks through
the Orientalist-Hellenic discourse (Dimaras, 1983: 419-425). Put simply: not
only did the Greeks end up believing that their nation was unique because of
the Western appreciation of Hellenic culture. They also convinced themselves
that the rest of the civilised world was just a Hellenic replica and by extension

a replica of modern Greece, the self-appointed offspring and heir of Hellenic
culture (see also Herzfeld, 1997: 102)
The image of Greece as a benefactor of humanity finds discursive uses
in the domain of contemporary politics. The PASOK government of Kostas
Simitis proudly stated on many occasions (such as during last decade’s
American bombardments in Serbia and after Greece’s recent ascendance to
the EU presidency) that Greece’s destiny is to assume the role of a righteous,
humanitarian arbiter. The rhetoric of Christian benevolence is also being recast
into the same old mould of ‘Hellenic civilisation’ with the help of foreign
political agents. Five years ago, US President Bill Clinton gave a speech on
Greece’s laudable role in the Balkans, especially after the country’s suffering
during the ‘bloody struggles of the 20 th century’. This is, according to Clinton,
a new version of civilisation, a humanitarian attitude that Greece and the US
share. The endurance of pain alludes to a deeper understanding of human
suffering and transcends even the magnificence of ancient Greek civilisation,
according to Clinton – a very shrewd use of the Greek value of suffering. It is
significant that the Greek News Agency proudly displayed this quote in an online
article (Athens News Agency).
This trope of suffering and endurance rises above political parties and
convictions. A similar argument was made in 1993, this time by the
conservative (‘New Democracy’) government of Kostas Mitsotakis. Finance
Minister Stephanos Manos insisted that Greece had a leading cultural and
economic role in the Balkans as an arbiter because it was the only country
with recognised EU membership. This role, which demands responsibility

according to Manos, was elaborated with constant recourse to the rhetoric of
‘burden’. Manos was partially demonstrating how much Greece has to ‘suffer’
in order to both justify its European identity and protect other countries. The
argument reappeared during the 2004 Olympic preparations, in an article by
Achilles Paparsenos, Press Counsellor of the Greek Embassy in the United
States. The article is entitled ‘Greece: a Leader in South-eastern Europe’ and
debates Greece’s importance in the region. Paparsenos tied domestic progress
in economy and infrastructure to the Olympiad of 2004, mentioning that
Greece has a major, though difficult, ‘stabilising role in the Balkans’ which is
endorsed and recognised at least by the US (Greek Embassy, Washington
D.C., Press Office). Like Manos, Paparsenos uses the trope of suffering and
attaches it to manifestations of political responsibility that is happily
acknowledged by the global economic superpower.
Nowhere is the rhetoric of the ‘burden’ better reflected than in the
‘Olympic Truce’ project of former Foreign Minister, George Papandreou. The
establishment of the Olympic Truce Foundation and of the International
Olympic Truce Centre in July 2000 promoted international commitment to
noble athletic competition and what Juan Antonio Samaranch, former IOC
President, called ‘the search for durable solutions to all conflicts destroying
peace around the world’ (Invgr.com, 2003; Greece Now, 2003). The reference
to ‘peaceful solutions’ originates in the uses of the so-called ekecheiria, a
Hellenic sacred truce with warring city-states whose role was to suspend
conflicts and assure fair and safe participation of the athletes in the ancient
Olympic Games. Papandreou initially signed an Olympic Truce book in 2001

together with Ismail Cem, the Foreign Minister of Greece’s historical enemy,
Turkey. The symbolic significance of this act is unambiguous: it demonstrated
that Greece was ready to assume a humanitarian ‘burden’ by sacrificing its
political interests in the altar of peace. We will not place this in the context of
Balkan micropolitics, but in the wider context of American global domination:
Papandreou’s involvement in the Olympic Truce aimed to ‘“open the way for
peace in certain regions”. Significantly, in 2003 Papandreou reminded his
audience that the IOC-sponsored initiative [was] being promoted with the full
co-operation of the United Nations’ (Greek Embassy, Washington DC, 3
December 2003). Against the bloody background of the post-war
reconstruction of Iraq, this message is anything but innocent: it ties a
romantic Olympic idea(l) to Realpolitik visions, as Papandreou himself
admitted (ibid.). The whole process unveils the ‘Greek martyr’ as a rather
sharp player in the international political arena.
We can just begin to recognise structural similarities in the
discursive tropes of nineteenth-century nationalism, current academic
discourses on Byzantine civilisation, and recent debates upon Greece’s
political identity and role in Europe. The idea that underpins them is
constitutive of the Greek cosmology and is informed by a strong
association between giving (giving civilisation, offering services), suffering
(the political rhetoric of the ‘burden’ is instructive) and recognition of
responsibility. In state discourse, the notion of giving is rationalised;
contrariwise, academic and nationalist discourses describe unconditional
giving of culture in emotional terms. This is congruent with, indeed

constitutive of, the Christian Orthodox value of Christ’s sacrifice for
humanity’s salvation. The most powerful metaphor of sacrificial giving is
the post-liberation narrative of the fall of Byzantium for the salvation of
the West, a crystal-clear transcendence of the dooming Western narrative
of the Original Sin.
The strategeki hermeneia, or strategic interpretation of this idea makes
sense in the 2004 circumstances. The fact that a supra-historical ‘Greece’
gave plenty without demanding return for so long is homologous to a rule
that defines the unique case of the ‘host’. Hosting involves the practice of
unconditional giving (on the part of the host) and unconditional taking (on the
part of the guest), ‘which evokes the inverted complementarity of the guest
situation’ (Berking, 1999: 88). By undertaking the burden of the 2004
Olympics, the Greeks re-play their sacrificial narrative of redemption. What is
redeemed in this case is a unique sense of their national community – a
community that is ‘imagined’ (in Benedict Anderson’s terms (1991)) in the
same way by both Greeks and the West.
Giving unconditionally and reminding others of it is not an act above
suspicion, of course. We could liken ATHOC’s and the IOC’s conflicting
mentalities to Georges Bataille’s general and restricted economies of
exchange respectively (Bataille, I, 1989). In the general economy of
exchange, unconditional giving is synonymous with sacrifice, a form of
symbolic power that cannot be contested. One may rightly argue that Greek
demands from others to recognise Hellenic giving violate the rule of
reciprocity: you don’t offer unconditionally only to demand back fiercely. This

attitude, however, is not irrational or incongruous with modern Greek national
politics. It is explicable on the basis of the impossibility of Greece’s actual
recognition as a civilised state, equal to those with ‘more progressive’
economies. The economic and political capital that Greece is currently
receiving from the EU and the US, and the cultural capital that it allegedly
gave to humanity are not identical – they cannot buy, to use the metaphor of
transaction, Greek equity. The symbolic construction of complementarity in
the Greek discourse of the ‘Western debt’ remains thus the only other option.
Because the Greek state cannot receive full recognition, state agents demand
symbolic reciprocation and a return of the Hellenic ‘gift’. This discrepancy
illuminates the place of Greek poniria in Greek disemia, a double-sign system
that supports the co-existence of two conflicting moral codes. More
specifically: on the one hand, it is immoral to demand a return of ‘gifts’. Like
Christ, one ought to give everything and ask nothing back. But the
practicalities of everyday exchange, the idea that humans are ‘fallen angels’,
after all, who fail to live up to Christian expectations, allows space for
‘cunningness’. Poniros may be, literally speaking, the Devil in Greek culture,
but it is also a social skill. To cheat means to defeat your opponents in
everyday life. Undoubtedly, the official Greek argumentation on Athens 2004
draws upon this disemic system to support the return of the Olympics to their
‘cradle’. This may explain why the most conservative Greek political circles,
notably the right-wing New Democracy Party, revived the idea of ‘bringing the
Olympics back to their homeland’ (The Christian Science Monitor, 24 February
1999) and never ‘lending’ them again.

This bears a striking resemblance to the case that Greece is making for
the Elgin Marbles: heritage belongs to its ‘legitimate heirs’ and not to those
who have the economic power to claim it. The proposal highlights the uses of
‘structural nostalgia’ even by the Greek state itself. According to Herzfeld,
structural nostalgia is the longing for a return to a time immemorial, ‘an age
before the state for the primordial and self-regulating birthright that the state
continually invokes’ (Herzfeld, 1997: 22). The concept can, however, be
stretched so as to embrace and interpret the Greek state’s collective recall of a
primordial and self-regulating right to what the celebrated Greek forefathers
owned. It is also symptomatic that, although New Democracy’s suggestion that
only Greece should organise the Olympics henceforth was dismissed, a number
of other suggestions reproduced its underlying principle. The most obvious
replay of structural nostalgia is ATHOC’s obsession with a ‘Cultural Olympiad’
2001-2004 (Cultural Olympiad). The project was directed by the Greek Ministry
of Culture, and aimed to draw attention to the significance of the host’s cultural
profile. This has been ‘a secondary issue’ for other hosts, but it is ‘the essence
of the Olympics for Greece’ (Cultural Olympiad), according to the Hellenic
Cultural Heritage, the specific organisation that deals with the event.
It is our ambition to make the Cultural Olympiad a permanent institution based in
ancient Olympia. It will be a custodian of the ideals of peace, fair play, creativity,
and the universality of man. The cultural Olympiad, working closely alongside the
International Olympic Committee and the Athens 2004 Committee, is linked to
UNESCO, the UN, and all the countries of the world. It is in this context that the
International Foundation of the Olympiad was set up in 1998 by Juan Antonio
Samarang [sic], Federico Major, and the Greek minister of culture Evangelos

Venizelos. Back in November 1997, the summit meeting of UNESCO unanimously
welcomed co-operation with the Cultural Olympiad organised by Greece, while the
Foundation was given official approval in early 1999.
The Cultural Olympiad goes beyond any kind of festival, according to the
Ministry of Culture, because it transgresses national and cultural boundaries
and highlights the ‘symbolic significance’ of cultural festivities. The rhetoric
presents all the signs of structural nostalgia: the call for a return to the
‘essence’ of the Olympics, namely ‘culture’, is a battle that the Greeks fight
against contemporary economic forces with which they cannot compete.
Despite the threat of sacrifice by modern capitalist exchange, the nature of
official Greek reaction does not change: economics must not precede or
supersede culture, the only sphere of human activity in which Greece retains
its autonomy and self-respect.
Towards a Hermeneutics of Historical Redemption
Things come full circle if we reconsider Benjamin’s meditation on progress.
Benjaminian progress points out that the identity of modern Greece is
constituted through the collection of history’s debris and fragments and their
piecing together. The ‘fragments’ of Western Orientalism, economic
dependence, and political contingencies used by Greek actors define the past
of their nation’s relationship with Europe and the West. However, the way
they are pieced together highlights the manner in which Greeks define the
future of this relationship. The rhetoric that official Greek actors use,
depicting the Olympic Games as both heritage and as a universal value that

changes hands in a system of reciprocal services, is the best possible example
of this process.
I began the paper by relating the phenomenon of Orientalism to the
case of Neohellenic identity-formation. I have explained that the Western
(often Western European) narrative, which made ancient Greek civilisation the
cradle of European modernity, derided modern Greeks as unworthy of their
Hellenic forefathers. However, I have argued that in the context of Athens
2004 Greek state agents use this narrative of European modernity in a
completely different fashion as a resistance mechanism. Their belief is that by
right of heritage Greece ought to be reciprocated by the West for what the
Hellenic forefathers offered to humanity: the ‘gift’ of ‘civilisation’. The
argument is based on the presentation of the Hellenes, ancient and modern,
as unconditional donors of the West by analogy with Christ’s self-sacrifice for
humanity. Within the framework of 2004, the very idea of the Olympics, with
its universal appeal and its Hellenic roots, was presented by Greek actors as a
more concrete version of the gift of civilisation.
At this point I identified a tension in the Greek 2004 discourse that can
be likened to Benjamin’s conviction that the angel of progress remains
stranded between past and present. On the one hand Greek state agents see
in the IOC’s return of the Olympics to their birthplace a recognition of their
national(ised) culture by an international community. On the other hand,
however, they know that this consent does not necessarily guarantee the
recognition of Hellenic symbolic capital in political or economic terms (and
therefore modern Greece’s treatment as equal to powerful Western

countries). Consequently, certain Greek actors violate the principle of
donation by ‘asking back’ for the Olympics, on the grounds that they comprise
the Greeks’ ‘usurped’ culture. Both attitudes (recognition of the Hellenic
Olympic ‘gift’ and its re-appropriation/demand for a permanent return) meet
the same ends, as they redeem Greek culture from the hell of Oriental
backwardness and permit its passage into ‘civilisation’. It is somehow ironic
that the very act of Greek self-redemption signals a process of selfrecognition.
For what it is worth, official Greek discourse on Athens 2004
articulates a version of identity that keeps the ‘Neohellenic’ imagined
community alive.
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